Artistic Touch: For Ventura photographic exhibit, the devil is in the essence, not detail

Contributed Photo/Amy Oliver
Amy Oliver’s photographic images for her solo exhibit, “Terrestrial,” at Buenaventura Gallery, were taken through the windows of commercial airplanes.

Resembling abstract art more than photographs, Amy Oliver's latest series presents the essential nature of her subject rather than the details.

Using a digital SLR camera, Oliver captured the images of distant landscapes through commercial airplane windows on trips she took over a five-year period across the country and overseas.

She is exhibiting 24 images in a solo show, "Terrestrial," through April 20 at the Buenaventura Gallery, 700 E. Santa Clara St., Ventura.

All in a 12-by-12 format, the mostly black-and-white images are printed on waterolor paper and framed simply.

"I want people to be engaged with them, to come close and look at them, to take some time and enjoy them," Oliver said. Some look like maps or drawings, some more recognizable than others.

"I am removing the place itself and you are just reacting to the image on the paper," she said.

Oliver got serious about photography at 14 when she asked her parents for a "real camera with lenses" for Christmas. She took photography classes in high school and at the community college in her hometown of Morehead City, N.C.

Good in math and science, she planned to follow her father's footsteps and become a doctor. But she selected Tufts University not just for its strong pre-med program, but also because it had a partnership with the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

"I wanted to take photography classes at a real art school," she said.

After spending a semester at an art school in Australia, she came back and switched her major from pre-med to photography.

"I realized I really loved photography and making art," she said.

She graduated magna cum laude with high thesis honors from Tufts, earning a bachelor's degree in photography in 2001.

Oliver moved to San Diego after graduation and worked as a photographer's assistant to learn about commercial photography.

"It made me decide I wanted to be in charge of the message that was in the photographs rather than having an art director or client tell me what the message needed to be," she said.

She went back to school and earned a master of fine arts degree from California Institute of the Arts in 2007 while working as an instructional assistant at Los Angeles City College. She has been an adjunct associate professor of media arts there since graduation and was hired as a part-time photography instructor at Ventura College a year ago.

Oliver and husband Jared Bishop, an artist with Walt Disney Imagineering, often came to Ventura to surf and were happy to move there.

The seed for Oliver's current series began in graduate school with her thesis project called "Projected Landscapes," in which she randomly changed the image in a gallery space.

"I was trying to get people to forget about the details that are so present in photography," she said. "I wanted people to have an emotional response to the image rather than an intellectual response."

She continued that theme with a series called "Quiet," exhibited in a solo show in 2011 at Stella Dottir in Los Angeles.

"My goal was to make it feel as if time didn't exist in those images," she said. "Then with ‘Terrestrial,' I am working with the notion of place and specificity."

It all came together as she looked out the window of an airplane.

"I realized the airplane was the perfect place to be addressing this issue, removing the details of a particular place and time, to abstract them, to get my viewer to a sort of reaction they might have from a painting or drawing, something that could be completely imaginary, but still having that firm footing in reality knowing that it is a photograph, that these places do exist," she said.

In her free time, Oliver surfs, plays the mandolin and works in their extensive backyard garden.

A reception for her exhibit is 4-7 p.m. Saturday. Her husband will serve his home-brewed beer made with hops they grow in their garden.